Page:The Way of the Wild (1923).pdf/125



was a half-grown cottontail. He was a grayish brown, although when he was fully grown and the snows of winter had come, he would he entirely white. Mother Nature is very wise in the way she guards her wilderness children. Those who cannot fight she protects in other ways.

So the rabbit, who is the most hunted little creature in the great woods, she colors according to the season. When it is summer and autumn she gives him a brown coat that will fit in well with the brown earth and dead leaves, but when the winter comes and all the earth is white his brown coat will not do at all, for then all his enemies would see it against the white snow, so she changes his coat to white.

Bunnyboy was lying asleep in a clump of bushes. His mother had gone to a distant field